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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

L'article explora la representació dels jueus i les jueves en l'art jueu medieval de la Corona d'Aragó, amb un focus especial en les hagadot il.luminades del segle XIV. Aquestes obres constitueixen una font essencial per comprendre com les comunitats jueves plasmaven la seva identitat cultural, religiosa i social. Les imatges que contenen reflecteixen, per una banda, els esquemes iconogràfics de l'època, concebuts per transmetre uns missatges concrets i, per l'altra, estan condicionades per la funció que exercien dins dels manuscrits, així com per les intencions de qui encarregava o comprava les obres. L'objectiu principal de l'article és analitzar les escenes cerimonials representades a les hagadot i aprofundir en les accions desenvolupades, els rols jeràrquics establerts, el vestuari i els trets físics que hi apareixen. Així mateix, l'article aborda una comparació amb les imatges produïdes des de l'àmbit cristià, per destacar-ne les diferències i similituds. Aquesta aproximació vol contribuir a una millor comprensió de la imatge dels membres de la comunitat jueva inclosa en uns manuscrits d'ús particular i familiar.

An unusual malaria vaccine made from whole parasites has shown impressive levels of protection in a small study. Tropical disease researcher Stephen Hoffman has spent the past decade working on a malaria vaccine made from weakened parasites. Two years ago, the first test of this vaccine in people failed. Now, Hoffman has evidence that his idea might just work. Online this week in Science , Hoffman and collaborators report that when given in a new way, their experimental vaccine protected 12 of 15 volunteers from malaria infection, including all six receiving the most doses. Those numbers are tiny. But 100% protection is the best result yet in the long and frustrating effort to develop a malaria vaccine.

Nina Paley’s animated musical Seder-Masochism reimagines the story of the Exodus. To Paley, the Exodus is not the pinnacle of God’s relationship with Israel but the silencing of Goddess religion. Paley draws heavily on the work of some “goddess feminists” to argue that YHVH’s rise killed “the Goddess.” This article discusses how Seder-Masochism portrays goddess worship in the ancient world in general and ancient Israel and Judah in particular. Tamber-Rosenau explores how Paley’s filmic portrayals of goddesses interact with the current state of scholarship on ancient goddesses. She then shows how the film’s central thesis that God silenced and killed the Goddess connects with Paley’s antitransgender ideology.

The ritual feast known as the Seder on the eve of Passover is one of the most family-oriented Jewish holidays observed in Israel. Rich in symbolism and narrative, it invites a wide variety of discussions, study, and intergenerational mentoring and supervision. In this article I demonstrate how the Seder can serve as a representational performance that includes gender and sexual identities normally omitted from Jewish liturgy and society at large. A Reform community workshop in preparation for the Seder Night, exposes congregants to alternative versions of the traditional Haggadah text and introduces new ritual gestures that allow for the \"presencing\" of gay and heterosexual life-stories. Old patterns and family traditions are undermined; special additions are added to the Passover plate and the Haggadah itself. Thus, the narrative of national redemption is reconstructed as gender redemption, marking the Israeli Reform Jewish community as an egalitarian agency of contemporary conflict for gender equality.

To explore whether secular culture in Israel can be more than a “thin brittle crust” that will crumble “at a time of crisis or conflict,” A. B. Yehoshua constructs fictional scenarios in which holidays are celebrated under particularly stressful circumstances for his characters. A Late Divorce (1982) races toward a Passover seder and engages systematically with this holiday's theme of freedom. Friendly Fire (2007) is set during Hanukkah and tallies each candle that Amotz Ya'ari lights with family members in Israel, while his wife lights none in Africa. Yehoshua's two historical novels, Mr Mani (1990) and A Journey to the End of the Millennium (1997), incorporate the high holiday season into their plots, generating a historiosophic conversation about Jewish beliefs and behaviors in the past and the present. Although Yehoshua's holiday scenarios undermine religious belief, his engagement with them actually aims to reinvigorate the relevance of historical markers of Jewish identity. He argues that national reform does not entail “easing the burden imposed by religion,” but rather exposure of the traditional commandments “to the complexities of life, to observe them while changing them.” Yehoshua's holiday scenarios thus operate as much more than mere folkloric backdrop to position his fiction within a Jewish timeframe: he uses holiday settings to critique traditional practices and beliefs, yet he does so to paradoxically strengthen a modern program of national Jewish reformation. This essay showcases Yehoshua's critique of national identity through holiday scenarios in A Late Divorce (Passover) and Friendly Fire (Hanukkah).

A rationalized and reinvented approach to vaccinating against malaria shows impressive results. [Also see Research Article by Seder et al. ] Malaria is an infectious disease that is responsible for more loss of young lives than any other health condition. Eighty percent of the cases and nearly 1 million deaths from malaria occur in Africa each year. Although mortality has decreased in recent years, more must be done to improve and save the lives of sufferers. On page 1359 of this issue, Seder et al. ( 1 ) report that an attenuated form of the causative parasite can be administered intravenously and provide protection against malaria, taking us a step closer to achieving the goal of an effective vaccine.

Saturday Night Seder (SNS) was broadcast online on 11 April 2020 as a public celebration of Passover and as a benefit for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Foundation. Part seder, part telethon, and part Broadway theatrical performance, SNS was the first online event to create a national Jewish communal gathering space in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and has since been viewed over 1.5 million times. This article examines SNS as a uniquely situated manifestation of COVID-19, and draws attention to the various affordances engendered by SNS for Jewish gathering, learning, and exchange. It draws upon interviews with members of the production team, featured participants, and expert informants, as well as viewer responses from Twitter and YouTube: a dataset that includes 2000 tweets and over 1800 YouTube comments. Collectively, these data suggest that cultural arts productions such as SNS have aiforded an expansive network of online Jewish conversations during COVID-19, and have invited a broad audience of Jews and non-Jews into dialogue over Jewish themes and content.